Thursday, May 06, 2010

The rap guide to Evolution

-By Baba Brinkman

Brinkman, a Canadian from Vancouver, a self-styled “rap troubadour,” with a master’s degree in English and a history of tree-planting (he has personally planted more than one million trees - according to his web site).

This is the only hip hop show that talks about mitochondria, genetic drift, sexual selection or memes. For Brinkman has taken Darwin’s exhortation seriously. He is a man on a mission to spread the word about evolution — how it works, what it means for our view of the world, and why it is something to be celebrated rather than feared.

At the end of the show he talks about the social slime mold Dictyosteliumdiscoidium streaming together while rapping about how cooperation evolves.Dictyostelium is notorious, in some circles, for its strange life-style. Usually, an individual Dictyostelium lives alone as a single cell. But when food is scarce, the single cells come together and form a being known as “the slug”; this crawls off in search of better conditions. When it finds them, the slug develops into a stalked fruiting body, and releases spores. But here’s the mystery: not all members of the slug get to make spores — and thereby contribute to the next generation — so why do they cooperate?
Here it is: